Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants

[seemslikeadream]

Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants


From Left: United States Air Force; Robert Young Pelton; Mike Wintroath/Associated Press; Adam Berry/Bloomberg News
From left: Michael D. Furlong, the official who was said to have hired private contractors to track militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan; Robert Young Pelton, a contractor; Duane Clarridge, a former C.I.A. official; and Eason Jordan, a former television news executive.
By DEXTER FILKINS and MARK MAZZETTI
Published: March 14, 2010

KABUL, Afghanistan — Under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program, a Defense Department official set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants, according to military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the United States.

The official, Michael D. Furlong, hired contractors from private security companies that employed former C.I.A. and Special Forces operatives. The contractors, in turn, gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps, and the information was then sent to military units and intelligence officials for possible lethal action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the officials said.

While it has been widely reported that the C.I.A. and the military are attacking operatives of Al Qaeda and others through unmanned, remote-controlled drone strikes, some American officials say they became troubled that Mr. Furlong seemed to be running an off-the-books spy operation. The officials say they are not sure who condoned and supervised his work.

It is generally considered illegal for the military to hire contractors to act as covert spies. Officials said Mr. Furlong’s secret network might have been improperly financed by diverting money from a program designed to merely gather information about the region.

Moreover, in Pakistan, where Qaeda and Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding, the secret use of private contractors may be seen as an attempt to get around the Pakistani government’s prohibition of American military personnel’s operating in the country.

Officials say Mr. Furlong’s operation seems to have been shut down, and he is now is the subject of a criminal investigation by the Defense Department for a number of possible offenses, including contract fraud.

Even in a region of the world known for intrigue, Mr. Furlong’s story stands out. At times, his operation featured a mysterious American company run by retired Special Operations officers and an iconic C.I.A. figure who had a role in some of the agency’s most famous episodes, including the Iran-Contra affair.

The allegations that he ran this network come as the American intelligence community confronts other instances in which private contractors may have been improperly used on delicate and questionable operations, including secret raids in Iraq and an assassinations program that was halted before it got off the ground.

“While no legitimate intelligence operations got screwed up, it’s generally a bad idea to have freelancers running around a war zone pretending to be James Bond,” one American government official said. But it is still murky whether Mr. Furlong had approval from top commanders or whether he might have been running a rogue operation.

This account of his activities is based on interviews with American military and intelligence officials and businessmen in the region. They insisted on anonymity in discussing a delicate case that is under investigation.

Col. Kathleen Cook, a spokeswoman for United States Strategic Command, which oversees Mr. Furlong’s work, declined to make him available for an interview. Military officials said Mr. Furlong, a retired Air Force officer, is now a senior civilian employee in the military, a full-time Defense Department employee based at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.

Network of Informants

Mr. Furlong has extensive experience in “psychological operations” — the military term for the use of information in warfare — and he plied his trade in a number of places, including Iraq and the Balkans. It is unclear exactly when Mr. Furlong’s operations began. But officials said they seemed to accelerate in the summer of 2009, and by the time they ended, he and his colleagues had established a network of informants in Afghanistan and Pakistan whose job it was to help locate people believed to be insurgents.

Government officials said they believed that Mr. Furlong might have channeled money away from a program intended to provide American commanders with information about Afghanistan’s social and tribal landscape, and toward secret efforts to hunt militants on both sides of the country’s porous border with Pakistan.

Some officials said it was unclear whether these operations actually resulted in the deaths of militants, though others involved in the operation said that they did.

Military officials said that Mr. Furlong would often boast about his network of informants in Afghanistan and Pakistan to senior military officers, and in one instance said a group of suspected militants carrying rockets by mule over the border had been singled out and killed as a result of his efforts.

In addition, at least one government contractor who worked with Mr. Furlong in Afghanistan last year maintains that he saw evidence that the information was used for attacking militants.

The contractor, Robert Young Pelton, an author who writes extensively about war zones, said that the government hired him to gather information about Afghanistan and that Mr. Furlong improperly used his work. “We were providing information so they could better understand the situation in Afghanistan, and it was being used to kill people,” Mr. Pelton said.

He said that he and Eason Jordan, a former television news executive, had been hired by the military to run a public Web site to help the government gain a better understanding of a region that bedeviled them. Recently, the top military intelligence official in Afghanistan publicly said that intelligence collection was skewed too heavily toward hunting terrorists, at the expense of gaining a deeper understanding of the country.

Instead, Mr. Pelton said, millions of dollars that were supposed to go to the Web site were redirected by Mr. Furlong toward intelligence gathering for the purpose of attacking militants.

In one example, Mr. Pelton said he had been told by Afghan colleagues that video images that he posted on the Web site had been used for an American strike in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan.

Among the contractors Mr. Furlong appears to have used to conduct intelligence gathering was International Media Ventures, a private “strategic communication” firm run by several former Special Operations officers. Another was American International Security Corporation, a Boston-based company run by Mike Taylor, a former Green Beret. In a phone interview, Mr. Taylor said that at one point he had employed Duane Clarridge, known as Dewey, a former top C.I.A. official who has been linked to a generation of C.I.A. adventures, including the Iran-Contra scandal.

In an interview, Mr. Clarridge denied that he had worked with Mr. Furlong in any operation in Afghanistan or Pakistan. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said.

Mr. Taylor, who is chief executive of A.I.S.C., said his company gathered information on both sides of the border to give military officials information about possible threats to American forces. He said his company was not specifically hired to provide information to kill insurgents.

Some American officials contend that Mr. Furlong’s efforts amounted to little. Nevertheless, they provoked the ire of the C.I.A.

Last fall, the spy agency’s station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, wrote a memorandum to the Defense Department’s top intelligence official detailing what officials said were serious offenses by Mr. Furlong. The officials would not specify the offenses, but the officer’s cable helped set off the Pentagon investigation.

Afghan Intelligence

In mid-2008, the military put Mr. Furlong in charge of a program to use private companies to gather information about the political and tribal culture of Afghanistan. Some of the approximately $22 million in government money allotted to this effort went to International Media Ventures, with offices in St. Petersburg, Fla., San Antonio and elsewhere. On its Web site, the company describes itself as a public relations company, “an industry leader in creating potent messaging content and interactive communications.”

The Web site also shows that several of its senior executives are former members of the military’s Special Operations forces, including former commandos from Delta Force, which has been used extensively since the Sept. 11 attacks to track and kill suspected terrorists.

Until recently, one of the members of International Media’s board of directors was Gen. Dell L. Dailey, former head of Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees the military’s covert units.

In an e-mail message, General Dailey said that he had resigned his post on the company’s board, but he did not say when. He did not give details about the company’s work with the American military, and other company executives declined to comment.

In an interview, Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, the top military spokesman in Afghanistan, said that the United States military was currently employing nine International Media Ventures civilian employees on routine jobs in guard work and information processing and analysis. Whatever else other International Media employees might be doing in Afghanistan, he said, he did not know and had no responsibility for their actions.

By Mr. Pelton’s account, Mr. Furlong, in conversations with him and his colleagues, referred to his stable of contractors as “my Jason Bournes,” a reference to the fictional American assassin created by the novelist Robert Ludlum and played in movies by Matt Damon.

Military officials said that Mr. Furlong would occasionally brag to his superiors about having Mr. Clarridge’s services at his disposal. Last summer, Mr. Furlong told colleagues that he was working with Mr. Clarridge to secure the release of Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl, a kidnapped soldier who American officials believe is being held by militants in Pakistan.

From December 2008 to mid-June 2009, both Mr. Taylor and Mr. Clarridge were hired to assist The New York Times in the case of David Rohde, the Times reporter who was kidnapped by militants in Afghanistan and held for seven months in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The reporter ultimately escaped on his own.

The idea for the government information program was thought up sometime in 2008 by Mr. Jordan, a former CNN news chief, and his partner Mr. Pelton, whose books include “The World’s Most Dangerous Places” and “Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror.”

Top General Approached

They approached Gen. David D. McKiernan, soon to become the top American commander in Afghanistan. Their proposal was to set up a reporting and research network in Afghanistan and Pakistan for the American military and private clients who were trying to understand a complex region that had become vital to Western interests. They already had a similar operation in Iraq — called “Iraq Slogger,” which employed local Iraqis to report and write news stories for their Web site. Mr. Jordan proposed setting up a similar Web site in Afghanistan and Pakistan — except that the operation would be largely financed by the American military. The name of the Web site was Afpax.

Mr. Jordan said that he had gone to the United States military because the business in Iraq was not profitable relying solely on private clients. He described his proposal as essentially a news gathering operation, involving only unclassified materials gathered openly by his employees. “It was all open-source,” he said.

When Mr. Jordan made the pitch to General McKiernan, Mr. Furlong was also present, according to Mr. Jordan. General McKiernan endorsed the proposal, and Mr. Furlong said that he could find financing for Afpax, both Mr. Jordan and Mr. Pelton said. “On that day, they told us to get to work,” Mr. Pelton said.

But Mr. Jordan said that the help from Mr. Furlong ended up being extremely limited. He said he was paid twice — once to help the company with start-up costs and another time for a report his group had written. Mr. Jordan declined to talk about exact figures, but said the amount of money was a “small fraction” of what he had proposed — and what it took to run his news gathering operation.

Whenever he asked for financing, Mr. Jordan said, Mr. Furlong told him that the money was being used for other things, and that the appetite for Mr. Jordan’s services was diminishing.

“He told us that there was less and less money for what we were doing, and less of an appreciation for what we were doing,” he said.

Admiral Smith, the military’s director for strategic communications in Afghanistan, said that when he arrived in Kabul a year later, in June 2009, he opposed financing Afpax. He said that he did not need what Mr. Pelton and Mr. Jordan were offering and that the service seemed uncomfortably close to crossing into intelligence gathering — which could have meant making targets of individuals.

“I took the air out of the balloon,” he said.

Admiral Smith said that the C.I.A. was against the proposal for the same reasons. Mr. Furlong persisted in pushing the project, he said.

“I finally had to tell him, ‘Read my lips,’ we’re not interested,’ ” Admiral Smith said.

What happened next is unclear.

Admiral Smith said that when he turned down the Afpax proposal, Mr. Furlong wanted to spend the leftover money elsewhere. That is when Mr. Furlong agreed to provide some of International Media Ventures’ employees to Admiral Smith’s strategic communications office.

But that still left roughly $15 million unaccounted for, he said.

“I have no idea where the rest of the money is going,” Admiral Smith said.

[Occult Means Hidden]

From a military commander's perspective, would it make sense to trust a third party to collect, act on and execute a military operation? A third party isn't privy to the kind of necessary up-to-the-minute intelligence needed for quick reaction actions.

I would think the military commander as being hesitant. Contractors of this sort may have their use. Doing dirty deeds that the military can't get away with - but that has never stopped the CIA in the past, has it? So what's the deal? Other than allowing your political ally a chance to enrich themselves through war? Could it be that they were hired not to fight terrorists, but to pose as them? I would think the modus operandi would be similar.

[nathan28]

From a military commander's perspective, would it make sense to trust a third party to collect, act on and execute a military operation? A third party isn't privy to the kind of necessary up-to-the-minute intelligence needed for quick reaction actions.

I really hate the "5GW" writers and their commitment to amorality and "this is the way it is and will always be"-isms, but John Robb (Brave New War) has flogged this to death w/r/t the implications of mercenary contracting, etc. "Up-to-the minute intelligence" is really just a cell-phone call away as far as most less-well-funded outfits are concerned. see also "You Sunk My Carriers" by Gary Bercher.

I would think the military commander as being hesitant. Contractors of this sort may have their use. Doing dirty deeds that the military can't get away with - but that has never stopped the CIA in the past, has it? So what's the deal? Other than allowing your political ally a chance to enrich themselves through war? Could it be that they were hired not to fight terrorists, but to pose as them? I would think the modus operandi would be similar.

Blackwater is IMO a CIA cut-out that got so big it became a thing in itself. Eric Prince has and had strong political connections, too, he's part of the AmWay fortune and really is one of the latter-day puppetmasters, or, more rightly, puppet-show stage-owners. He's secretive, that's for certain. But this recalls that 2005 arrest of the two British guys busted while they posed as insurgents trying to seize an Iraqi jail to release prisoners. Likewise just look at all the internet rumors from Pakistanis over Blackwater operating inside Pakistan months and months before the Pentagon confirmed and then denied Blackwater/Xe's presence in the country. Obviously the part of the point is sowing confusion.

Think about it not like a military officer but like a businessman. How do you profit? By exploiting inefficiencies and asymmetries, or outright creating them. What is a mercenary if not a businessman with some guns and a willingness to dodge bullets?

This is all speculative.

And on edit, when I read the title, I thought it said "...to Track and Kill Mutants."

[seemslikeadream]

US official 'misled' generals about private spy network
(AFP) – 4 hours ago
WASHINGTON — A senior Pentagon official broke Department of Defense rules and lied to military officials when he set up a network of private contractors to spy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the New York Times reported Friday.
The Times cited an internal investigation stating that the official, Michael Furlong, set up an unauthorized spy network starting in late 2009 and "deliberately misled" top generals about it.
Pentagon rules forbid using contractors as spies.
But some of the information provided by the network was used for strikes against militants, the Times reported.
The results of the Pentagon investigation, ordered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, are classified, the Times said.
It added that the Air Force inspector general is conducting a separate probe to see if Furlong broke any laws or committed contract fraud.
Furlong?s network was made up of small companies -- including one run by an ex-CIA agent -- that used agents in Afghanistan and Pakistan to gather intelligence on militant groups.
It operated under a 22 million dollar contract run by Lockheed Martin, according to the Times.
The Pentagon probe concluded that "further investigation is warranted of the misleading and incorrect statements the individual made" about the legality of the program, Pentagon spokesman David Lapan told the paper.
Furlong, a senior Air Force civilian official, however told the newspaper that his work had been approved by a number of senior military officers in Afghanistan, and that he misled no one.

old news

Pentagon investigates Jason Bourne spy program (Part 1)
March 18th, 2010 5:42 am ET


Michael Furlong led illegal spy ring in Afghanistan
The Department of Defense is investigating an illegal spy operation in which a Defense Department official by the name of Michael Furlong purportedly diverted $24 Million of government funds to an “off the books” real world Operation Treadstone to kill militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mr. Furlong, who once served as deputy director of the Joint Military Information Support Command and Deputy Commander of the Joint Psychological Operations Support, referred to his stable of contractors as “my Jason Bournes”.

The ruction over the incident is a bit perplexing because, although it does indeed sound like something out of a Robert Ludlum novel, the U.S. government has been outsourcing clandestine and covert activities for years.

Ground truth
It appears that Mr. Furlong and his associates were trying to enhance the quality of the military intelligence apparatus, however, they might have gone a bit too far according to officials in the C.I.A. Ironically, this story breaks not long after the U.S. top spy chief in Afghanistan issued a blistering report of the defense intelligence community that we covered a few months ago in a story entitled U.S. spy chief calls for cultural overhaul of defense intelligence.

Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn had chastised intel agents for gathering the wrong types of information in Afghanistan. He accused them of being incurious of local economics and landowners, ignorant of who the powerbrokers were in the region and thought they were disengaged from those in the best position to find answers, including aid workers and Afghan soldiers. He went so far as to recommend that journalists be used as intelligence agents because they are a better source of information.

What was frustrating for the General is that all of this information is “open source” intelligence which is readily available to anyone willing to do the research. He was also very critical of the fact that U.S. intelligence focused only on gathering intel for “lethal targeting” and hunting terrorists.

Mr. Furlong agreed with the General’s assessment, well at least partially, because he hired journalists to gather “ground truth” information about the cultural landscape in Afghanistan. However, Furlong also used this information for “lethal targeting” anyway, but contract money meant for open source intelligence gathering cannot be used to target individuals, according to military officials. And, according to the New York Times, it is illegal for the military to hire contractors to act as covert spies – a shocking revelation considering it seems like common practice.

Privatizing intelligence is nothing new
The reality is that key intelligence operations have been run by private contractors for quite some time. A few years ago, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) revealed that 70% of the intelligence budget goes to contractors. The CIA, who blew the whistle on the latest controversy, doesn’t have much room to talk because they outsource up to 60% of the work done by the National Clandestine Service (NCS), which is responsible for gathering human intelligence. The CIA calls these employees “green badgers” and they provide highly sensitive services that have ranged from covert operations in Iraq to recruiting and running spies.

In 2006, the CIA collaborated with private U.S. military companies, including a firm called ATS Worldwide, and British security firms to run covert operations in Somalia against UN rulings. US firms planned undercover missions to support Somalia’s transitional federal government against a radical Muslim militia which promised national unity under Sharia law. Just last year it was reported that infamous Blackwater operatives gathered intelligence and helped direct a secret U.S. military drone bombing campaign that ran parallel to the CIA predator strikes.

R.J. Hillhouse is an expert in intelligence outsourcing and has a website called The Spy Who Billed Me, which includes a list of private companies that do espionage work on behalf of the U.S. government. She has links to 33 companies under a heading called “Rent a Spy”, which include companies like Abraxas, Booz Allen, CACI, CENTRA, Diligence, ITT AES, Lockheed Martin, ManTech, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, SAIC, and Total Intel.

According to Wired magazine, on Monster.com you can find a job ad for an “all-source intelligence analyst” willing to work for U.S. Forces-Afghanistan. Responsibilities include:

Analysis, reporting, data-basing and dissemination of Afghanistan measures of stability which include security, governance and development, Human Terrain Analysis, preparation of Campaign and Mission Analysis briefings and annexes, High Value Individual Targeting products, Extremist and Regional Threat Network Nodal Analysis, Preparation of Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Assessment Metrics which include daily IMINT, SIGINT and HUMINT products to gauge the effectiveness of collection operations, 24/7 Indications & Warning and all-source exploitation of documents and media from detainees.”

One of the firms involved in Furlong’s shadowy program was American International Security Corporation (AISC), which is run by former Green Beret Mike Taylor. On its website they promote themselves as a security risk management firm that does vulnerability assessments and crisis management for both business and governments. Taylor admitted employing Duane “Dewey” Clarridge as part of Furlong’s off the books program, who is an ex-CIA operative involved with the Iran-Contra scandal.

Calnet is another company that provides intel services and on their website they say: “CALNET is proud to continue to serve the United States Intelligence Community.” The website also specifies some of the types of work they do, including human intelligence gathering:

CALNET’s HUMINT experts are involved in a variety of missions from the tactical level to Strategic roles within our national intelligence community. CALNET’s HUMINT specialists have years of experience and uphold the highest professional standards. CALNET's intelligence professionals are involved in all steps of the intelligence cycle, from planning and direction, to collection, processing, production, and dissemination.

A company called CACI markets themselves as an information technology firm, but they sure operated outside of their supposed core competencies in Iraq because CACI personnel acted as interrogators at Abu Grahaib and were accused of some of the well publicized torture of prisoners, along with another government contractor called Titan Corp (now owned by L-3 Communications). During their investigations the Army found that contractors were involved in 36 percent of Abu Ghraib incidents.

======

In Part 2 of Pentagon investigates Jason Bourne spy program we discuss the territorial battle between the CIA and the military over covert activity and the shadowy connections between the New York Times, an ex-CIA officer who was involved in Iran-Contra and a former CNN news executive.

PART TWO

Title 10 vs. Title 50
A major part of the controversy surrounding a Defense Department official by the name of Michael Furlong who diverted government funds to establish an illegal spy ring to assasinate militants in Paksitan and Afghanistan, involves a territorial dispute between the CIA and military intelligence agencies over who can carry out covert versus clandestine operations, which are distinct.

According to Title 50 of the U.S. Code section 413(e) covert action is the sole authority of the CIA. Covert action is defined by federal law as: “an activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly.”

Whereas clandestine means the operation is concealed but not the sponsor. Putting it simply, to the U.S. government clandestine means “hidden” while covert means “deniable.” It is important to note that federal law requires Presidential approval and significant executive and legislative oversight of covert action, which reduces the risk of “rogue” programs.

Traditional military activities are defined under Title 10 and do not require the same approval and oversight as those categorized as covert. Sometimes the Defense Department will use loopholes to categorize certain operations as traditional versus covert for this reason. An action is not covert, according to one interpretation, if the intelligence gathered or the operation supports ongoing hostilities.

According to David Ignatius in the Washington Post yesterday, Furlong tried to use one of these loopholes:

Under the heading of ‘information operations’ or ‘force protection’ the military has launched intelligence activities that, were they conducted by the CIA, might require a presidential finding and notification of Congress. And by using contractors who operate ‘outside the wire’ in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the military has gotten information that is sometimes better than what the CIA is offering.”

Ignatius also parses the semantics used by Furlong to categorize the work by Clarridge. Clarridge’s reports were labeled “force protection atmospherics,” not intelligence, and that sources were called “cooperators.” By avoiding using intelligence collection vocabulary, Clarridge’s network evidently tried to avoid crossing the line into Title 50.

Shadowy Connections
It is interesting to note that of all the news outlets to break this story, it was the New York Times which, according to Mr. Ignatius, hired the aforementioned American International Security Corp. (AISC) in November of 2008 to help free its reporter David Rohde who had been kidnapped by the Taliban. Who did the firm use to lead the mission? Duane "Dewey" Clarridge. Mr. Clarridge then began establishing a network of informants around the globe.

Clarridge currently has about 10 case officers under his domain from the United States, Britain, South Africa and a few other countries, who run about 20 "principal agents" who are in contact with roughly 40 sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Clarridge's contacts with the military deepened last July after he provided detailed intelligence about Bowe Bergdahl, an Army soldier who had also been captured by the Taliban. Ignatius also mentions that Clarridge's network continues to provide fresh intelligence, including his latest report from Paktia province on Monday, the same day the New York Times article appeared.

Furlong hired another controversial figure by the name of Eason Jordan, a former Chief News Executive for CNN, to run a public Web site called AfPax Insider to help the government gain a better understanding of the region, although this intelligence was also used to hunt and kill militants. Mr. Jordan is infamous for revealing in 2003 that CNN knew about human rights abuses committed in Iraq by Saddam Hussein since 1990. In 2005 Mr. Jordan resigned after claiming that it was official U.S. military policy to take out journalists, though he possessed scant evidence to validate his assertions.

Fujrlong also contracted International Media Ventures (IMV), a company describing itself as a public relations company and “an industry leader in creating potent messaging content and interactive communications.” Several of its senior executives are former members of the military’s Special Operations forces, including former commandos from Delta Force.

The company’s President Robert Pack said they provide "information and media atmospherics, research and analysis for good governance and development in Afghanistan, civil society demographics and dynamics, key audience and influence group analysis, and media channel utilization.”

Journalists as spies
It is still unclear who authorized Mr. Furlong’s rogue escapades, but one American government official said: “While no legitimate intelligence operations got screwed up, it’s generally a bad idea to have freelancers running around a war zone pretending to be James Bond.”

Frederick Forsyth, the author of the Day of the Jackal, had an interesting perspective on the matter:

If you want to have journalists on the payroll, a far easier way to go is to insert a professional trained agent as a journalist...if you take an ordinary journalist and say 'hey, become a spy,' he's likely to get up dead.”

CNN news chief starts Iraq blog hub
Dec 14th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | 4 Comments
There’s been no shortage of mainstream or traditional journalists leaving their jobs to join or start online ventures over the last little while (the sign of a new era, or a bubble forming?), including The Politico — which just gained a couple more staffers from Time magazine and Bloomberg, as this article notes. Now the former head of news for CNN has started a media venture focused on Iraq.

According to a piece in Editor & Publisher, Eason Jordan — who quit in 2005 after 23 years with the network — has set up IraqSlogger to focus on the war in Iraq and the Middle East in general. The project is an offshoot of Praedict, a news and information service that Jordan runs which provides briefings on hot spots in the developing world, based on data and analysis by a team of security specialists and journalists.


IraqSlogger has news reports from Iraq, analysis and other coverage, including a tally of attacks and casualties. E&P says that “One of the site’s unique and most valuable services is a daily roundup of news from Iraqi newspapers that few in the U.S. media have ever bothered to translate. Jordan has Arabic speakers here and in Iraq providing this service.”

And a note at the end of the E&P story says that the article produced a lot of commentary from conservative bloggers, who asked Jordan to look into stories from Associated Press (about the burning of six Iraqis) which used as a source a police captain named Jamil Hussein, who the U.S. military claims doesn’t exist. Jordan offered to fly blogger Michelle Malkin to Iraq to check the reports, and she has accepted.

Part of the backstory here is that Jordan resigned from CNN after making comments that allegedly accused the U.S. military of deliberately targeting journalists.

Update:

As has been noted in the comments (by Mr. Pelton himself) the IraqSlogger site was co-created by Robert Young Pelton, the Canadian-born author (The World’s Most Dangerous Places), documentary filmmaker, “adventurer” and security expert. Meanwhile, there’s a great feature on Eason Jordan and IraqSlogger at the New York Observer.

Why Was the FBI Investigating Michael Hastings’ Reporting on Bowe Bergdahl?

By Alice Speri

June 3, 2014 | 3:40 pm
Three years into the disappearance of Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan, Michael Hastings — the journalist whose reporting cost General Stanley McChrystal his job — wrote a Rolling Stone story on the missing soldier, a piece which the magazine called “the definitive first account of Bowe Bergdahl.”

Hastings, who died in a car accident in Los Angeles in June 2013, had unparalleled access for that story.

Last POW in Afghanistan has been freed. Read more here.

He spoke to Bergdahl’s parents, who had by that time stopped talking to the press, following “subtle pressure” from the army, and he quoted from emails the young soldier had sent to them, documenting his growing disillusion with the war and the US military.

Hastings also spoke to several unnamed men in Bergdahl’s unit — soldiers who, we now know, had to sign a strict nondisclosure agreement forbidding them from discussing the soldier’s disappearance and search with anyone — let alone one of the top investigative journalists in the country.

'Michael and Matt both worked really, really hard on that story, and I know for a fact that they did it in a way that completely angered the US military and the US government.'
But most controversially, Hastings’ piece revealed what has been the subject of much debate and vitriol over the last few days: That a disillusioned Bergdahl had actually abandoned his post and “walked away.”

At the time of the story’s publication, the media had all but forgotten about Bergdahl — who was released on Saturday after five years in the hands of the Taliban, in exchange for five Guantanamo prisoners. And, with the exception of some initial chatter, Hastings’ piece, which paints a deeply unflattering picture of Bergdahl’s unit and its leadership, hardly had the impact of some of his other investigations.

But someone did pay attention to it: the FBI.

That, at least, is what was revealed in a heavily redacted document released by the agency following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request — filed on the day of Hastings’ death — by investigative journalist Jason Leopold and Ryan Shapiro, an MIT doctoral student whom the Justice Department once called the “most prolific” requester of FOIA documents.

‘Superhero’ suing feds over Nelson Mandela’s 1962 arrest records. Read more here.

The document, partially un-redacted after Leopold and Shapiro engaged in a lengthy legal battle with the FBI for failing to fulfill its FOIA obligations, singles out Hastings’ Rolling Stone piece — “America’s Last Prisoner of War” — as “controversial reporting.” It names Hastings and Matthew Farwell, a former soldier in Afghanistan and a contributing reporter to Hastings’ piece.

'If this deployment is lame, I’m just going to walk off into the mountains of Pakistan.'
The document also included an Associated Press report based on the Rolling Stone piece, and what it identifies as a “blog entry” penned by Gary Farwell, Matthew’s father — which actually appears to be a comment entry on the Idaho Statesman’s website.

“The article reveals private email excerpts, from [redacted] to his parents. The excerpts include quotes about being ‘ashamed to even be American,’ and threats that, ‘If this deployment is lame, I’m just going to walk off into the mountains of Pakistan,’” the FBI file reads. “The Rolling Stone article ignited a media frenzy, speculating about the circumstances of [redacted] capture, and whether US resources and effort should continue to be expended for his recovery.”

'I’m happy the FBI is reading Rolling Stone on the job.'
The FBI file — as well as a Department of Justice document released in response to Leopold and Shapiro’s lawsuit — suggests that Hastings and Farwell’s reporting got swept up into an “international terrorist investigation” into Bergdahl’s disappearance.

A spokesperson for the FBI told VICE News that the agency does not normally comment on pending investigations and that it lets FOIA documents “speak for themselves.” The investigation was still pending as of last month, Leopold said.

According to the files — and a rare public statement by the FBI following Hastings’ death — Hastings was never directly under investigation by the agency, despite having pissed off a lot of people in very high places.

White House defends prisoner swap to free American POW. Read more here.

But it is not exactly clear why Hastings and Farwell’s “controversial” reporting made it into a criminal investigation that was already active before they even wrote the Rolling Stone story.

'The FBI says Hastings was not a target of their investigation but his reporting was. How do you investigate someone's reporting without investigating them?'
“Michael and Matt both worked really, really hard on that story, and I know for a fact that they did it in a way that completely angered the US military and the US government, and while other reporters were steering away from it, they were totally on it,” Leopold told VICE News. “The FBI was investigating this, whether they were investigating Michael or investigating the story, and there was a lot of fear around it, because they characterized the story as ‘controversial’ — whatever that means.”

“Then the question became, why was the FBI looking at this, what were they looking at?” Leopold added. “The FBI says Hastings was not a target of their investigation but his reporting was. How do you investigate someone's reporting without investigating them?"

Farwell declined to discuss the details of the file, but told VICE News, “I’m happy the FBI is reading Rolling Stone on the job.”

He had not known that his name, and his father's, showed up in the FBI's files until Leopold pointed it out to him. Leopold told VICE News: "When I showed Matt these files he was like, oh my god, this is basically outlining my conversations."

Farwell said: “When it first came out it was just Michael, and Jason was like, ‘Hey dude, this has your dad in it.’ And I was like, ‘Oh shit, they're talking about me in these redactions, that's weird.’ Anyway, I signed a privacy waiver and sent it out to Jason."

Entire paragraphs in the FBI documents remain redacted — leaving many questions about the scope of the investigation into the journalists’ work. But the un-redacted sections about Farwell characterize him as a 10th Mountain infantryman, who helped broker a meeting between Hastings and — presumably — some of the sources for the Rolling Stone story.

Now that Bergdahl is free, the lid on Pandora’s box has been lifted.
In his comment on the Idaho Statesman's site, also picked up in the FBI file, Farwell Senior comes to Bergdahl's defense after the Rolling Stone article sparked backlash against the soldier, of a similar sort that we are seeing today. He also credits his son for brokering Hastings’ meeting with the Bergdahls.

“I’m going to excuse that young kid for his choice of words, but I’m not going to excuse the leadership of his outfit, nor the misguided policies of our government in Afghanistan and elsewhere which have put our young people in harms way without a clear vision of what they are doing,” Farwell, himself a retired Air Force officer, wrote then. “It’s my hope this Rolling Stone article helps the Bergdahl’s get their son back and helps expose some misguided policies and conduct far above the pay grade of this young disillusioned soldier.”

Now that Bergdahl is free, the lid on Pandora’s box has been lifted.

'Even before Bergdahl’s release, “the dam was getting ready to burst.”'
“For five years, soldiers have been forced to stay silent about the disappearance and search for Bergdahl. Now we can talk about what really happened,” Nathan Bradley Bethea, who served in Bergdahl’s battalion, wrote in the Daily Beast on Monday. “I served in the same battalion in Afghanistan and participated in the attempts to retrieve him throughout the summer of 2009. After we redeployed, every member of my brigade combat team received an order that we were not allowed to discuss what happened to Bergdahl for fear of endangering him. He is safe, and now it is time to speak the truth.”

"Bergdahl was a deserter, and soldiers from his own unit died trying to track him down," Bethea stated.

Soldiers forced to silence for years have now taken their accounts — and anger — about the missing soldier’s ordeal to social media and the press. Republican strategists eager to turn Bergdahl into the next Benghazi have also jumped on the opportunity to offer critics of the young “deserter” up for interviews, as the New York Times noted today.

'As for the circumstances of his capture, when he is able to provide them, we’ll learn the facts.'
In the last few days, Bergdahl has been blamed with the deaths of “every American soldier killed in Paktika Province in the four-month period that followed his disappearance,” according to the Times — charges that the Pentagon dismissed as unsubstantiated. Today it was reported that the army will launch an inquiry into the circumstances of Bergdahl's disappearance and his personal conduct.

"The questions about this particular soldier’s conduct are separate from our effort to recover ANY U.S. service member in enemy captivity," General Martin E. Dempsey said in a Facebook post today. "As for the circumstances of his capture, when he is able to provide them, we’ll learn the facts. Like any American, he is innocent until proven guilty. Our Army’s leaders will not look away from misconduct if it occurred."

The Gitmo prisoner exchange puts deals above grim justice. Read more.

A US Army investigation into Bergdahl's own conduct might appease or inflame his critics. But even before Bergdahl’s release, “the dam was getting ready to burst,” Farwell said.

“That was one of the weirdest things about the case, that everyone in the whole brigade was required to sign a pretty strict nondisclosure agreement that was enforced at a pretty high level, so basically if any of the people from that unit talked about Bowe, they thought they could be losing their careers,” Farwell said. "It was a blanket statement, ‘you will not talk about anything about this.'”

And while there is no suggestion — in the un-redacted bits of the FBI file on Hastings — that the agency was after any soldier who had taken his frustrations to the press, the fact that the FBI was looking into the reporters’ sources and methods raises at least the question.

Now, everyone wants to talk about it. But Hastings’ ever “controversial” reporting got to it first.